


Battle Scars

by anythingbutplatonic



Series: Olicity Hiatus Road Trip Collection [8]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Body Worship, Discussion of wounds/injury, F/M, Mature Sexual Content, Minor season 4 spoilers if you haven't seen the trailer, Nudity, References to PTSD/trauma, References to violence/death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-29
Updated: 2015-09-29
Packaged: 2018-04-24 00:39:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4898851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anythingbutplatonic/pseuds/anythingbutplatonic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You have so many scars," she said, half in wonder and half in sympathy. "Battle scars. So many of them..."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Battle Scars

 “How did you get this one?”

 Felicity tapped the small pinkish-white mark on his shoulder, her touch feather-light and impossibly gentle. There was no judgement on her face, only curiosity, her blonde hair spread out like a halo on the pillow where she lay next to him, her cheek against his bicep. He could feel her breath on his skin, warm in the rapidly-cooling air of the room. 

“First time I got shot with an arrow,” Oliver said evenly. “I’d just washed up on Lian Yu, and buried my father. Yao Fei put an arrow in my shoulder and brought me to his camp, where he’d been hiding out.”

“So it was the first scar you got on the island,” Felicity confirmed, tracing the shape of it with the tip of her finger. It was smoother to the touch than she had expected, perhaps because of how old it was, compared to his other scars; it was the most faded, and the most healed. But there was still a mark left behind, a memory captured for all time. One of the many that Oliver’s body held. 

She planned to acquaint herself with all of them. 

Moving across to the other side of his chest, keeping her touch light, her hand found the black tattoo just over his heart. “This is the Bratva’s mark,” she asked, covering it with her palm, “isn’t it?” 

Oliver nodded. “But I never told you that...”

“No,” Felicity replied. “I just took a lucky guess. And I was right. I usually am about most things.” 

This time, Oliver barked a laugh, grinning. “I’m not going to argue with that. You’re very smart.”

“I’m not just  _very smart_ , Oliver. I went to MIT. I majored in Computer Science and Cybersecurity. I’m a  _genius_ ,” she said, matter-of-factly. 

“You’re a genius,” he repeated, ducking to press his lips to her forehead. “A  _very smart_  genius.”

“ _Oliver_ ,” she warned, stabbing his chest with one finger. “Don’t ruin the moment.” 

At that, he cocked his head to the side, reminiscent of the puppy she was always reminded of when she looked at him, especially now, when they were both stark naked and sleepy and sated from sex. “Moment? I didn’t realize we were having a moment.”

“Of course you don’t, you’re a man,” Felicity replied simply, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, “but we were, and now you need to shush so that I can finish my exploration of this very fine body of yours. And by that, I mean I want to get to know your scars. I want to know all about them. Not that you have to tell me, if you don’t want to, and I can totally stop and we can just...sleep, or something, if it makes you uncomfortable...”

Her fingers were tapping a nervous rhythm on his chest as she babbled, her cheeks flushing pink in that way that made her look, in his opinion, particularly radiant. Then again, he’d always felt that way about her. He caught up her hand and wrapped his own around it, lacing their fingers together. “I don’t mind. I’d like to tell you about them. Or maybe not so much that I’d like to, but I want to. It’s like I told you before; I want to tell you everything, eventually. You deserve to know, Felicity.”

Felicity nodded. “O-Okay. Okay, that’s good. I’d like that.” She smiled, a soft, gentle smile that she reserved for only him. It was her ‘I’m so in love with Oliver Queen’ smile - and those were her own words, since he’d once asked her about it in a roundabout way, and that’s what she had called it then. Her  _I’m so in love with you_  smile. Felicity untangled her hand from his. “Shall we continue?”

He gestured with his free hand, the one that wasn’t currently resting on her bare waist.  _Go ahead_. 

“This one,” she touched the longer, thinner scar near his Bratva tattoo. “Where did you get this one?”

“Tortured,” he said, and Felicity sucked in a breath involuntarily. 

She had known that the island was bad. But she hadn’t known it was  _that_  bad. 

“It’s okay,” Oliver reassured her. “Or maybe it isn’t, I don’t know. It was a long time ago. These,” he gestured to two other, angry-looking scars, reddish gashes across his lower chest and stomach, “are from the same incident. A man named Edward Fyers, a mercenary on the island, wanted information on Yao Fei. I refused to give it to him.”

Felicity watched the way his jaw set slightly, his chin lifting just that little bit; he had been interrogated, and won. She could see that he was proud of that. That he had survived and not given in. 

Steel and fire, that’s what Oliver was made of. And she was glad that he was starting to see that within himself, too. 

It was what she had seen in him from the very first time she had ever met him. 

Well, perhaps not the  _very_  first time. Maybe it had  _really_  started when she’d found him bleeding in the backseat of her car and something inside her had lurched painfully at the thought of what had  _really_  happened to him on that island, enough to drive him to don a green hood and shoot people with arrows for the good of the city. 

And the answer to that question? Was a  _lot_. 

“Hey,” Oliver called to her softly, lifting her chin up with one finger so that they were looking directly at each other, “you look like you’re thinking pretty hard. Is this bothering you?”

“No,” Felicity replied, just as softly. She traced absent patterns on his skin with her fingers, just skirting the sensitive outline of each scar. “Just thinking. Nothing bad, I promise.”

_You’re brave_ , she wanted to tell him.  _You’re the bravest person I’ve ever met_. 

But now wasn’t the right time for that. 

Instead, she lifted herself up from the pillow and slowly, very slowly, began to press her lips to each of his scars in turn, covering each one with a kiss that made Oliver gasp sharply, the muscles in his stomach twitching with the effort of staying still. 

She started with the scar on his shoulder, the first one he’d ever gotten from Lian Yu, her mouth covering the small mark easily. She heard him suck in a breath with surprise, his hand momentarily tightening on her hip.  _I’m sorry,_ the kiss said.  _I’m sorry this happened to you_. 

When she slid out from under his arm, the sheets around her waist slipped, exposing her back and legs to the cool air, and her bare breasts grazed his chest as she bowed her head to press a kiss, first, to the Bratva insignia near his heart, and then the scar close to it, the one he had said he had been given under torture. The puckered skin was rough under her lips, but she hardly noticed; this wasn’t about what she felt. It was about what  _he_  felt. About what she wanted to tell him, though she couldn’t find the words to speak out loud.

_You’re more than your past. What happened to you doesn’t define you_. 

She moved her mouth over the gashes across his shoulder and left bicep, pressing her lips to each one in turn, and she was close enough that she could feel his breath stirring her hair, the hum of pleasure he made in the back of his throat at having her this close to the worst parts of himself, the parts he had come to loathe so deeply for what they represented - pain, and hurt, and suffering, so much suffering - and have her not care. No, more than that; to have her not care, and to have her  _love_  those parts of him, to bless them with kindness of her kiss and make him feel just that little bit less....damaged. 

Because damaged skin, he was slowly learning, did not mean a damaged heart. 

Nosing along his ribcage, she heard him laughing when her breath tickled his skin, warm and smooth under her cheek, laughter that quickly turned into another sharp gasp and a groan of her name, “ _Felicity”,_ when she put her mouth over a third large scar, just under his ribs. 

_What happened to you was terrible. I want to help make it better._

She was almost fully naked to the air now, the sheets on her side of the bed pulled down around her ankles, tangled around her calves. A few months ago, she hadn’t even  _had_  a side of the bed; now, not only did she have a side, but she also had someone to share it with.

“Sssh,” she whispered, her voice muffled, “I’m going to take care of you, Oliver.”

No reply came, just harsh breathing and another stifled groan as she scooted further down the bed, throwing one leg over his so that she was crouched over him at waist level, the cool air raising goosebumps over the skin of her back and thighs. He felt, rather than saw, her mouth close over the gash on his hip where Ra’s al Ghul’s sword had gone in, warm and soft and almost too much on the sensitive skin stretched over the bone, and his hips jerked involuntarily, pushing himself closer to Felicity’s oh-so-gentle lips. 

Felicity put a hand on his thigh to keep him in place; she giggled against his skin. “ _Down_ , mister.”

Oliver made a frustrated sound in the back of his throat, but obeyed nonetheless; he tried very, very hard to keep still as Felicity moved to the scar across his lower stomach, opposite the line of Chinese symbols down his right side. 

“ _Tease_ ,” he gasped as she brushed her lips over the reddish-pink gash, wanting to reach out and tangle his fingers in her hair, do  _something_. 

“Not teasing,” she murmured, her blue eyes serious where looked up at him from underneath her hair, “taking care of you.”

His gaze softened underneath half-closed lids, the way it always did when she said or did something out of the blue that took his breath clean away. “I love you.” 

That made Felicity perk up from where she was crouched at his waist. “I love you, too.” Then her face re-arranged itself into a businesslike expression. “Now let me finish.”

He snorted, more out of surprise rather than genuine humour; even when stark naked and dangerously close to a certain part of his body that was showing signs of being re-awakened by her proximity, she was still his Felicity. 

She traced, with her lips, the Chinese symbols on his side; she couldn’t read them, but she didn’t need to.  _What happened to you was terrible_ , this kiss said.  _But they’re a part of you. They make you who you are_. 

Crawling back up his body, she peppered his bare chest with kisses, keeping her body maddeningly out of reach; because this wasn’t about sex, however tempted he might be to initiate a repeat of earlier that night, judging by the rapid rise-and-fall of his chest, the dark flush to his cheeks, the sparkle in his hooded eyes. No, it wasn’t about that. This was about something else. 

_You’ve become someone else_. She remembered her own words on that fateful night, after Ra’s had been stopped and the city was, yet again, safe at the hands of Oliver and the rest of their team. How she’d pressed her hand to his chest, over his heart, and felt it beating as he’d told her that he longer wanted to be The Arrow; he just wanted her. 

She reached the burn mark at the top of his chest, faded now to a whitish blemish. As she bent to kiss it, the way she had done with all the others, she felt Oliver tuck a lock of her hair back behind her ear, and she felt the way his fingers lingered on her cheekbone, her jaw, the base of her throat. 

If she had been asked how someone so hardened by so much pain and fear could be so gentle and loving, she would tell them that they simply hadn’t had the experience of the friendship, and compassion, and love of someone like Oliver Queen. 

So much pain and, in the end, so much love to give because and in spite of it. 

“Turn over,” she whispered. “Facing me.” 

Oliver did as she asked, the mattress creaking beneath his weight as he shifted onto his side so that they were face-to-face. The top of her head barely reached his chin this way; his body was hot where they lay next to each other, millimeters apart, and she could see all the different hues of blue in his eyes, sapphire and azure and the soft blue of a cloudless, summer sky. 

She ran her hands over his broad shoulders and around to his back, where she felt the raised edges of yet more scars, crisscrossing his skin like chainmail; and there, on his shoulder, she could feel under her fingertips the brand left by Ra’s al Ghul, when he had had no other choice but to become Al Sah-him, to save Thea. To save them all. 

She didn’t miss the way Oliver flinched slightly when her fingers found the ugly mark, shaped like an arrowhead, or the way he drew his breath and held it in anticipation of what she might say or do. There was much they knew about each other, now, that they hadn’t before; but this, the most recent of events, was still fresh in both their minds, and it was something that they hadn’t quite worked out how to deal in its entirety yet. 

“Felicity....” he began, but she raised a finger to his lips to silence him. 

“Don’t,” she said simply. “It wasn’t your fault. You had no choice.” 

He was quiet then, and she could almost guess what he was thinking.  _John doesn’t see it that way_.  _And there’s a good chance he never will._

Her free hand searched his back, almost a caress in its gentleness, finding the smooth, bare skin where the tattoo of a Chinese dragon had once been, another brand forced upon him, this time by Slade Wilson, as a reminder of his responsibility for the death of the woman he loved, a woman named Shado who had had the same tattoo on  _her_  shoulder. A couple of weeks ago, he had asked her to research places that did laser tattoo removal, and she hadn’t understood why until they’d lain in bed together that night and found his shoulder bare, the skin pink and scrubbed clean of any mark or design. 

It had been a gift to himself, he’d explained to her. A second chance, allowing himself to let go and move on from at least part of his past. 

“A literal clean slate,” she’d giggled, before pressing her lips to the empty space and murmuring that she was proud of him, her cheeks flaming as soon as the words had come out of her mouth.

Now, she let her hands trail down to his waist, then around to his front once more, her palms flat on the hard muscles of his stomach. He was still breathing rapidly, the dark flush on his skin spreading downwards, making his scars stand out even more vividly in the half-light. 

“You have so many scars,” she said quietly, half in wonder and half in sympathy. “Battle scars. So many of them....”

“Felicity,” Oliver caught one of her wrists, wrapping his calloused fingers around it. For a moment, he seemed to have forgotten what he was going to say. 

_Oliver Queen, speechless,_  Felicity thought.  _Now there’s something you don’t see every day_. 

Then, just two words. “Thank you.”

Felicity cocked her head to the side, her brow furrowing. “For what?”

Oliver contemplated this question for a moment, choosing his words carefully. “For reminding me that I’m not as damaged as I think I am.”

“You’re not damaged,” Felicity protested with a shake of her head. “You’re brave.”

“Still,” he replied, tugging playfully on a loose lock of her hair. “Thank you.”

She sighed. “You don’t have to thank me. You  _can_ , however, kiss me, if you want to.”

Oliver didn’t need to be told twice. 


End file.
